Vintage terminals (was Re: PDP-11 available in New Zealand)

On 3/8/07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: The TECO macro "vtedit.tec", in various flavors, was used to simulate a visual editor by chopping up bits of the file being edited and slinging them around on the screen with TECO as if you were using something like EDT or vi or whatever else you think of when you edit text in a more advanced way than a simple line editor (like 'ed'). I don't recall off the top of my head how to invoke it, but essentially, you'd fire up TECO in a way so as to drag your file (or a blank file) into the edit buffer, then get TECO to execute the VTEDIT macro on the buffer, letting you walk through the file, make changes, save it, etc. There are a number of TECO macros here... http://mvb.saic.com/freeware/vax88a3/tecoc/ The one called 'vt52.tec' looks interesting. I used to have a keymap printed out and taped to my VT52 that looks a lot like the grid embedded in this file. I never could read TECO macros by glancing at them, so I'll defer to others on how it all works at the bottom layer. I could do simple stuff with TECO, but mostly relied on vtedit.tec working correctly to get any "real" work done under OS/8. Thinking about this all, I should fire up my SBC6120 with my IOB6120 and see how well the VT52 emulator in the IOB6120 FPGA works. For those that don't know the hardware I'm describing, the SBC6120 is (was?) a 12-bit single-board micro based on the IM6120 microprocessor (PDP-8/e-like), and the IOB6120 was an FPGA-based peripheral for it that gave it 3 more serial ports, a 2MB RAM disk, a printer port, and an emulated console VT52 (with VGA output and PS/2 keyboard input). If the VT52 emulation isn't good enough, all the code is available for me to improve it. I just have to learn VHDL first. ;-) -ethan